SOURCE: Roe, John. Introduction to The Poems: Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, The Phoenix and the Turtle, The Passionate Pilgrim, A Lover's Complaint, by William Shakespeare, edited by John Roe, pp. 1-73. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

[In the following excerpt, Roe provides an introduction to Venus and Adonis, focusing on the poem’s ending, rhetoric, and tragic and comic elements. Additionally, Roe comments on Shakespeare's appeal to the Earl of Southampton in the dedication, studies the influence of Ovidian texts on Venus and Adonis, and compares the poem to Christopher Marlowe's Hero and Leander.]

VENUS AND ADONIS

THE POEM

By virtue of its exuberant stylistic confidence, Venus and Adonis has always been recognized as a leading example of the erotic narrative tradition. It shares with Marlowe's Hero and Leander, with which it is often compared, a brilliance and accomplishment which other poems in the genre imitate but do not match. With these two effortlessly fluent masterpieces English poetic sprezzatura comes of age. Discerning compatriots would have leafed through their pages with feelings of incredulous admiration and pride. Later, Romantic poets such as Keats and Coleridge gave special praise to Venus and Adonis for its quickness of wit, imaginative bravura, and liveliness of detail.

Sidney's belief in the power of art over nature, a dominant credo of the period, finds itself repeatedly vindicated.¹ Take for example the famous stanza describing Adonis's horse:

Look when a painter would surpass the life
In limning out a well-proportioned steed,
His art with nature's workmanship at strife,
As if the dead the living should exceed—
          So did this horse excel a common one,
          In shape, in courage, colour, pace, and bone,

(289-94; my italics)

The purpose of such descriptions is to bring out the life of things in such a way as to exceed even the power of life itself. Keats writes to his friend Reynolds on the celebrated snail image (1033-4) that Shakespeare ‘has left nothing to say about nothing or anything’ …. Coleridge puts a similar point differently when he commends Shakespeare's subtlety in rendering vivid detail: ‘You seem to be told nothing, but to see and hear everything.’² Such observations suggest that not a little of the poem's appeal lies in its convincing evocation of a living moment. Yet the argument that life as portrayed in poetry excels natural life brings us back to the poem's art. Much of its power derives from its verbal dexterity, not just in hitting off successful details such as the evocation of the horse (259-300), or the snail simile (1033-34), but in the way in which words play on each other.

Much of this has to do with the role played by rhetoric in shaping the poetic character of Venus and Adonis. For the Elizabethans rhetoric constituted one of the great discoveries of antiquity. Perhaps ‘the application of rhetoric’ is a better way of putting the matter, since the precepts of classical orators such as Quintilian and Cicero had been available throughout the Middle Ages. What is curious about the application of rhetorical principle in Elizabethan poetry is that it differs in manner even from the ancients whose principles it revives. Latin poets such as Virgil, Ovid, and Horace indisputably observe the relations of words to each other and produce effects comparable to those described and recommended in theories of oratory. Yet the Elizabethans' self-conscious display of wit in creating verbal effects exceeds anything in classical literature and is probably greater than in contemporary Europe. Petrarch certainly knew how to pun, as his wordplay on the name Laura makes clear, but Elizabethan poetic punning seems to be of unprecedented intensity. Not only the pun but the stylish use of a wide range of rhetorical tropes characterises the poetry of the 1590s. Even Wyatt, who puns frequently, does not display anything like the variety of figures of speech which occur in the opening sonnets of Astrophil and Stella. And of course this dexterity is not confined to the genre of poetry: verbal virtuosity is the distinguishing mark of Love's Labour's Lost (written probably between 1593 and 1595). Neither ancient comedy nor the comedy of another contemporary European literature demonstrates wordplay on so sophisticated a scale. The fact that linguistic principles in Spain, Italy, or France were at the time comparatively more settled may account to some degree for the uniqueness of the English position. As studies of Shakespeare's vocabulary have shown …, the English language was expanding at a considerable rate and its grammatical and syntactical character undergoing fundamental modification.³ Culturally England had absorbed the impact of the Reformation and was a strong independent Protestant country within a geographical alignment of states dominated by Catholicism. In such circumstances it is not surprising that the trope of oxymoron, or antithesis, inherited from Petrarchan poetry, should register changes in how it was used and a marked increase in frequency. Punning similarly indicates division or unsettled meaning. When Venus pleads for a kiss from Adonis she puns on the different senses of the word ‘seal’:

Pure lips, sweet seals in my soft lips imprinted,
What bargains may I make still to be sealing?

(511-12)

The word means variously the sign of authority which certifies a document and the conclusion of a bargain. Hinted at is the idea of things being sealed in silence, or made impermeable. Such punning works antithetically in that it enables a range of meanings to be comprehended at once (which no other deployment of language can do), while reminding us pointedly that meanings contradict and conflict with each other. Sealing a bargain denotes an agreement between equals, whereas the privileging seal of a king denotes inequality; the official pomp and display of a documentary seal differs from the furtive sealing of lips to keep a secret. The pun accordingly signals the ideal capacity of language to bring different and discordant meanings together while yet underlining the divisions that exist in reality. Poetry such as that of Venus and Adonis keeps uppermost in mind the relationship between the word and the world. The differences separating Venus and Adonis, differences of temperament, inclination, and disposition, differences in ethical outlook (including each's own internal contradictions), cannot be resolved by the debating parties within the poem nor in the judgement of its readers. Attempting to take a consistent ethical reading of, for example, Venus's sensuality is bound to fail. The play of language in the poem sees to that. The subversions of wordplay are no trite affair, nor are they mere surface merriment. For wordplay is not, as we have just seen, only divisive (though current fashions in linguistic theory concerning instability would insist that it was). It provides the only solution there is—an aesthetic one, which is beyond the scope of continuous, unfinished, formless action. The language of the poem encapsulates human reality, fragmented, inconclusive, and frustrating, and submits it to the order of art. If we are to see an ideal principle in the poem it is this: not an approved human choice as represented by one of the protagonists more than the other, for the poem does not ultimately evaluate such things, but a balanced contemplation of feelings, motives, and actions from contrasting or opposing angles.

Venus and Adonis is both a tragic and a comic poem. Because people are affected differently by it, and differently at different times, responses vary; we have already noted some of them. Like all poems which seem in any way to advocate sexual licence, its sensuality is held against it. Venus has powerful detractors, such as C. S. Lewis and Don Cameron Allen,⁴ who argue that Shakespeare expects us to disapprove of her. We cannot do that any more than we can disapprove of Adonis. If we were to reverse allegiances, for instance, and say that Venus expressed the poem's essential spirit of exuberance, then we would be forced to include Adonis's courser along with her, the logic of this being, to adapt Sidney, ‘to wish ourselves a horse’ (Apology, p. 95). It is important, therefore, to distinguish between the overall character of the poem and locally occurring statements or appeals.

But how does the poem affect us by and large? It works by contraries, celebrating the principle of erotic pleasure embodied in Venus while countering this with that refinement of spirit expressed in Adonis. Between the two polarities degrees of approximation can be observed. Adonis's integrity is tempered by his childish petulance over the loss of his horse (325-6); but such chafing and lowering of brows is none the less attractive, as Venus finds. Venus's voluptuous appeal is qualified by her disingenuousness; yet that aspect of her too finds an answering chord in the reader who is no longer sexually innocent. The erotic principle, embodied in Venus, is never confused with mere lasciviousness, as it is in Marston's more voyeuristic poem, The Metamorphosis of Pigmalion's Image. Nor, despite attempts to link the poem with Nashe's salacious Choise of Valentines …, is there much to satisfy pornographic inclination. The closest the poem comes to this is the moment when Venus sketches for Adonis a picture of sensual possibilities:

‘Fondling’, she saith, ‘since I have hemmed thee here
Within the circuit of this ivory pale,
I'll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer:
Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale;
          Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry,
          Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.

(229-34)

Even as she holds out the prospect of her body as a place in which to graze she turns the grazer from an eager scavenger into a timid animal finding refuge from ‘tempest and from rain’. The duality of such imagery keeps a constant balance between the twin appeal of erotic enjoyment and tender restraint, the poem shifting back and forth easily between the two. Its success depends on neither principle's becoming dominant.

But there is a moment when the balance may seem to be upset and the ethical question matter more. This comes when Venus manages to prolong her kissing of Adonis, enacting for herself something of the enjoyment she promises him in the stanza quoted above:

Now quick desire hath caught the yielding prey,
And glutton-like she feeds, yet never filleth;
Her lips are conquerors, his lips obey,
Paying what ransom the insulter willeth,
          Whose vulture thought doth pitch the price so high
          That she will draw his lips' rich treasure dry.
And having felt the sweetness of the spoil,
With blindfold fury she begins to forage;
Her face doth reek and smoke, her blood doth boil,
And careless lust stirs up a desperate courage,
          Planting oblivion, beating reason back,
          Forgetting shame's pure blush and honour's wrack.

(547-58)

These stanzas touch on the more troubling side of sexuality, namely the process whereby possession leads to loss, or, in this precise instance, how the grip of desire removes rational control, which constitutes human dignity. The description matters less as an account of Venus's attempt to ravish Adonis, and more as an indication of how the self is lost as brute instinct gains ground—‘reason’, ‘shame’, and ‘honour’, all signs of self-consciousness, being temporarily obliterated. Such moments derive their inspiration in part from the Metamorphoses, which repeatedly shows characters undergoing transformation as a result of a sexual encounter, most famously in the pursuit of Daphne by Apollo in Book I. This frightened virgin escapes her fate at the god's hands by being changed into a tree; the subsequent flowering symbolises the irresistible force of sex, which, though denied its immediate object, does involve an enforced change in her condition: Daphne gives up her maidenly freedom to come and go as she pleases, and takes root. Without going so far as to enforce a physical change in his protagonists as they experience passion (Adonis only flowers in death), Shakespeare none the less portrays the powerful psychological transformation which a person temporarily undergoes in the grip of sexual longing. The same argument is applied more despairingly in The Rape of Lucrece and in Sonnet 129:

Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had,
Past reason hated,

and further,

Mad in pursuit, and in possession so,
Had, having, and in quest to have extreme,
A bliss in proof, and prov'd, a very woe,
Before, a joy propos'd, behind, a dream.

(Sonnet 129. 4-7, 9-12)

The difference between these observations and those of the passage quoted from Venus and Adonis is that Venus never experiences the ‘having’. She is on the point of but never possesses ‘bliss’. However furiously her face may reek, such ‘desperate courage’ never fully confronts conscience, for the sexual act remains unconsummated, ‘unhad’. Within a couple of stanzas of her leaving off kissing him Adonis tells Venus that tomorrow he means to hunt the boar:

                                                                                whereat a sudden pale,
Like lawn being spread upon the blushing rose,
Usurps her cheek; she trembles at his tale,
And on his neck her yoking arms she throws.
          She sinketh down, still hanging by his neck;
          He on her belly falls, she on her back.

(589-94)

At this point the poem fully recovers its tone of tender comedy and pathos, and the recovery is made possible by the fact that desire remains unglutted. The voracious Venus of only a moment before adopts a more passive posture. Even as she ‘devours’ Adonis the narrative varies the significance of her action and its effect upon him by introducing images which would be unthinkable in a sonnet such as 129 and inappropriate to The Rape of Lucrece:

Hot, faint, and weary with her hard embracing,
Like a wild bird being tamed with too much handling,
Or as the fleet-foot roe that's tired with chasing,
Or like the froward infant stilled with dandling,
          He now obeys.

(559-63)

Taming is injurious to a wild bird, though it is kind to calm a tetchy child; a deer at the beginning of a chase is eagerly hunted, but when seen at the end, exhausted, it arouses pity. This process of revising analogies places a check on those images which maintain an idea of the brutality of appetite, so that not only do they modify the impression of a threatened Adonis conjured earlier, but at least one of them even justifies Venus's attentions.

One of the poem's most discerning and judicious critics, Hallett Smith, finds that the provincialism of such images makes it the inferior of Hero and Leander for sophistication:

There is nothing like the variety of color, of surface finish, that Marlowe's poem exhibits. And curiously, Shakespeare's queen of love herself seems considerably less divine than the semi-human figures of Hero and Leander.

(Elizabethan Poetry, p. 86)

The maternal Venus observed above supports Smith's impression, as does the occasional gawkiness of Adonis. Yet while Shakespeare's poem may defer to Marlowe's on the point of surface accomplishment (Hero's costume and Leander's anatomy are both richly evoked in comparison with the largely undescribed persons of Venus and Adonis), as a poem of atmosphere and mood rather than of expressive detail it shows a capacity for introspection lacking in the earlier work. This has again to do with Coleridge's instructive observation (quoted above), ‘You seem to be told nothing, but to see and hear everything’, but also with Shakespeare's more sympathetic narrative stance, which shares the hopes and frustrations of Venus equally with the youthful, naive idealism of Adonis. By contrast, Marlowe's amused and caustic commentator keeps a knowing distance from both his protagonists, whom he regards as equally untutored. His point of view (to invoke a Jamesian term) is provided by the mature, homosexual Neptune, whose desire for Leander is more self-confident than desperate. Marlowe gives the impression of knowing all the answers, whereas Shakespeare's narrator shows slightly more concern to explore the questions. Shakespeare, who allows freer play to instinct, filtering his theme less than Marlowe through the lens of scepticism, creates a dimension of pathos as the action moves from the common Marlovian ground of inadvertent slapstick to that of the brutality of chance and accident at the moment in which the boar catches Adonis unawares. In their different and opposing ways both Venus and Adonis exercise the freedom nature offers to take one's pleasure according to one's inclination. But what she senses, and what he is still too young to have learnt, is equally true: nature's freedom recognises no distinction of value or intention; violent accidents or impulses also share it. The world that acknowledges the force of Venus's sexual appeal is the same one that includes the boar's mindless savagery. This is not to say, as if often claimed, that the two are identifiable, or that the boar stands as an allegory for an essential destructiveness in Venus's passion; but they are in some respects coextensive: what nature permits the one she must allow to the other.

The effect of pathos is realised variously in the depiction of the two principals, partly in the not-altogether callow innocence of the youth (see for example Adonis's condemnation of lust in lines 793-810), but also in Venus herself, who renounces her procreative advocacy following the death of the boy, prophesying instead that love will henceforth act cruelly and arbitrarily. To some degree Shakespeare follows the practice of classical authors in observing this contradictory behaviour of a deity: a goddess being still a woman and therefore subject to whim might turn petulant when crossed, acting out of character and even contrary to her own interests. But that does not sufficiently explain the force of Venus's dire prediction, which issues in a spirit of lament as much as threat, as if she is discovering that things have changed beyond her control. It is not Adonis now but fate that has crossed her, and, understanding this, she declares her new-found opposition to love as much in terms of a submission to destiny as an edict of her own rule:

Since thou art dead, lo, here I prophesy,
Sorrow on love hereafter shall attend;
It shall be waited on with jealousy,
Find sweet beginning, but unsavoury end;
          Ne'er settled equally, but high or low,
          That all love's pleasure shall not match his woe.

(1135-40)

In the attempted ‘rape’ scene, as the prospect of raging sexuality gradually fades, it is followed by a series of statements which appear to vindicate Venus in terms of carpe florem:

What wax so frozen but dissolves with temp'ring,
And yields at last to every light impression?
Things out of hope are compassed oft with vent'ring,
Chiefly in love, whose lease exceeds commission:
          Affection faints not like a pale-faced coward,
          But then woos best when most his choice is froward.
When he did frown, O had she then gave over,
Such nectar from his lips she had not sucked.
Foul words and frowns must not repel a lover:
What though the rose have prickles, yet 'tis plucked.
          Were beauty under twenty locks kept fast,
          Yet love breaks through, and picks them all at last.

(565-76)

As she sinks fainting at the news of what he intends the next day, she finds herself at last lying beneath him; this is enough to revive her, but to no avail:

Now is she in the very lists of love,
Her champion mounted for the hot encounter.
All is imaginary she doth prove;
He will not manage her, although he mount her:
          That worse than Tantalus' is her annoy,
          To clip Elizium and to lack her joy.

(595-600)

The broad comedy secures the complete release of the poem from the darker effects that temporarily cloud it. In The Rape of Lucrece, …, such disturbances are not negotiated so lightly, and there is to be no similar recovery of equilibrium; but Venus and Adonis maintains its tone by restricting blame to fortune and the laws of mortality while steadily reducing the role of conscience.

It would be overstating matters to say that the poem presents us with a vision of the golden age longed for by Tasso, in which ‘S'ei piace, ei lice’ (i.e. ‘if it gives pleasure, it is lawful’). Like the Aminta, from which this statement of pleasure as natural law comes, Shakespeare's protagonists experience the frustration that characterises the pastoral mode. In a true golden age pleasure is indeed lawful and according to the will of nature; but in a fallen age nature works contrarily, encouraging pleasure on the one hand while denying it on the other.

Venus might be regarded less as a goddess than as a creature from a perfect world who has strayed into a lesser one, and has to adjust to different principles. ‘Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done; neither with pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too much loved earth more lovely. Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden’ (Apology, p. 100). Sidney reminds us that what is golden is the poem which takes command of the fragmentary nature of experience and gives it perfect expression. Coleridge speaks of ‘the power of reducing multitude into unity of effect, and modifying a series of thoughts by some one predominant thought or feeling’. The rhetorical, self-conscious, artificial style of Venus and Adonis succeeds in rendering instinct more instinctual and life more lively than our inchoate responses perceive it to be.

The poem ends in the only way that will permit unqualified sympathy for each of the protagonists: Adonis dying pointlessly and prematurely, Venus grieving for him but still unloved. Differences of moral outlook are settled in the grim destiny which, as nothing else can, draws them close to one another. It is not exactly that we should now discount the ethical debate which was so prominent earlier; but we are shown that the moral sense is too closely bound up with the experience of living to be able to judge it in detachment.

Coleridge long ago laid the ghost of the moral problem (though it is never entirely still):

Hence it is, that from the perpetual activity of attention required on the part of the reader; from the rapid flow, the quick change, and the playful nature of the thoughts and images; and above all from the alienation, and … the utter aloofness of the poet's own feelings, from those of which he is at once the painter and the analyst; that though the very subject cannot but detract from the pleasure of a delicate mind, yet never was a poem less dangerous on a moral account.

(Coleridge, pp. 15-16)

As the examples cited from the text have perhaps made clear, Shakespeare feels closer to his protagonists than Coleridge, bound by a more stringent public morality, dares to allow. We need no longer look for excuses on this account. But Coleridge is entirely right in directing attention to the spirit and energy which inform artistic principles, and in reminding us that the imperfections and contradictions experienced by human nature find in art a sustaining fullness of meditation.

BIOGRAPHICAL CONSIDERATIONS

The first and by no means the least significant observation to make about the two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, is that Shakespeare wrote them when he was on familiar terms with the Earl of Southampton in 1593 and 1594. This much we know from the two letters of dedication printed at the head of each poem. Southampton was a coming man in the decade of the 1590s, and Shakespeare was not alone in regarding him as a promising Maecenas. The lexicographer John Florio dedicated his Worlde of Wordes (1598) to him, and Barnabe Barnes commended his sonnet sequence Parthenophil and Parthenope with a further sonnet extolling Southampton's ‘gracious eyes’ (‘Those heavenly lamps which give the Muses light’), thereby exhorting the earl to ‘view my Muse with your judicial sight’.⁵

In the lower reaches of the literary trade, Thomas Nashe fortified his risky venture of publishing a sensational prose romance, The Unfortunate Traveller, with a flattering epistolary account of Southampton's helpful attitude; and he may also have made him a gift of his pornographic poem A Choise of Valentines.⁶ Nashe appears to follow Shakespeare in writing a letter (rather than the more formal sonnet) in craving the earl's indulgence, his dedication to The Unfortunate Traveller even imitating some of the stylistic flourishes of Shakespeare's address to Southampton at the beginning of Venus and Adonis.

Akrigg in his biography suggests that Southampton had set about establishing a literary circle which would emulate the one which had held sway a generation before, namely that of Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke, whose family he joined in a remote connection by marrying Essex's cousin.⁷ A young man of undoubted charm and promise (he was still only nineteen when Venus and Adonis was published), assuredly more in tune with the dawning era of the theatre than Sidney's moralistic sister, and privileged by his sex to associate with men of the stage, Southampton seemed an ideal patron for figures like Nashe and Shakespeare, in their pursuance of the uncertain, often perilous profession of letters. In the event, things did not work out so well. The earl came to show more of an interest in a military and political career than in the arts, and, unlike Sidney with whom he had soldiership in common, he was no poet himself. More to the point, he was often in debt and unable to make the financial returns hoped for by sycophantic authors (which may explain why Nashe's dedication disappears from the second edition, published the same year).⁸ On coming of age late in 1594 (the hour of Nashe's and Shakespeare's expectancy), he was saddled with two large expenses: one a payment to the Crown for the transfer of his lands, the other a fine for the staggering sum of £5,000 which he was obliged to pay Lord Burghley upon failing to honour a contract to marry the latter's granddaughter (Akrigg, pp. 38-9).

It was probably the closure of the theatres in 1593, consequent on the outbreak of the plague, that caused Shakespeare, who was already the author of several plays, to turn to poetry and Southampton's patronage in the first place. Coinciding with this is the point that Shakespeare in the early 1590s, the time of the sonnet vogue, could not yet be certain that his future lay in the theatre. As an erotic narrative, Venus and Adonis imitates the form made popular by Lodge (Scillaes Metamorphosis, 1589) and cultivated by Marlowe, who, despite his dramatic successes, put a good deal of creative energy into Hero and Leander (1593; published 1598), thought to be his last work. The sonnet and the narrative poem together held the field in the early 1590s. However, an entry in the Queen's treasurer's accounts for March 1595 identifies Shakespeare as a member of the Lord Chamberlain's players who had performed before her Majesty the previous Christmas.⁹ The theatre was active again, and Shakespeare had resumed his career as dramatist and performer. He and Southampton were going their separate ways.¹⁰

Yet this is not the last sighting we take of the earl in connection with Shakespeare, for the poem itself appears to convey a few hints.

Within the impersonal concerns of theme and artistry, a few possibly biographical notes may be struck. Adonis is treated throughout the poem with a mixture of humour and affection which might suggest that Shakespeare had a real person in mind. The Hilliard portrait leaves us in no doubt as to Southampton's youthful beauty. Further significance may attach to the use of the name of Narcissus, invoked by Venus as she despairingly urges him to follow his procreative instincts.¹¹ Southampton's reluctance to marry Burghley's granddaughter (already mentioned in connection with financial difficulties) possibly struck contemporaries as a sign of fastidiousness. Did, as some have supposed, Burghley's employee John Clapham write his Latin poem Narcissus (1591) as an indirect rebuke to the young ditherer … ? But along with Shakespeare's teasing of the boy goes a certain measure of regard for the principles he espouses. His expostulation on love, which he insists to Venus is not at all the same thing as lust (see Ven. 787-804), portrays an Adonis who is both touchingly naive and yet admirably pure of heart. Is Shakespeare tempering whatever criticism may be implied by the Narcissus analogy with a more flattering appraisal? The picture he presents of Adonis is more complex than that of Ovid's thoughtless young blood who indulges the goddess's passion but then recklessly goes off and gets himself killed hunting the boar (Metam. 10. 708ff.). And the requiem for the youth sung by the Shakespearean Venus, who insists on his Orphic qualities (see below and 1093-1104n), similarly exceeds any claim that Ovid makes on his behalf. Yet even to introduce Ovid into the discussion is to acknowledge that arguments concerning the biographical aspects of Venus and Adonis are limited in the information and insights they afford, and it is to the literary questions posed by the poem that we need to turn.

THE LITERARY CONTEXT AND TRADITION

Popular from the thirteenth century onwards, Ovid came into new and vital contact with English poetry as a result of Arthur Golding's translation of the mythologically exciting Metamorphoses in 1567. Further editions followed in 1575, 1584, and 1587, attesting to the impact of Golding's work. Unlike an epic such as the Aeneid, Ovid's poem conveniently divides into numerous discrete episodes involving perennially fascinating topics such as frustrated passion, incest, rape, and murder, all of which, including the last, are aspects of its erotic character. In addition, the overall theme of transformation or change of identity makes for keen psychological interest. With Ovid the epic's customary sphere of action broadens to include something of a more reflective dimension, so that the poet seems not merely to be presenting a startling event but also musing on what may underlie its occurrence. The sonnet, first in the hands of Petrarch and as adopted subsequently in England by Wyatt, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, and notably John Donne, had already shown a disposition towards psychological reflectiveness, and the Ovidian epyllion (as these erotic narrative poems have become known)¹² made such explorative possibilities further available. What masterpieces in the form such as Hero and Leander or Venus and Adonis typically show is the encounter between two lovers, or would-be lovers, and the invariably tragic aftermath of their innamoramento. Tragedy, rather than romance, is the other main element of the epyllion, and is the stuff of such plays as Romeo and Juliet, which Shakespeare could have written either before Venus and Adonis or, more likely, a year or two after The Rape of Lucrece. The poems deal exclusively in terms of the amorous encounter, omitting the social and political framework,¹³ but, like the drama, they depict the lovers as two characters who in their separate ways register the effect of passion upon them. The fullness of characterisation, especially as undertaken by both Shakespeare and Marlowe, far exceeds anything contemplated by Ovid, as is shown by the length of the Elizabethan treatment of the fable which characteristically extends Ovid's one or two hundred lines into a poem of over a thousand. At the same time, it must be recognised that the Elizabethan poet did not limit his adaptation of Ovid to the Metamorphoses. Hero and Leander derives not from this poem but from Ovid's Heroides (Heroic Ones), the theme of which is the writing of love epistles. Usually, the letters are sent by despairing women to men who are either fickle or indifferent; but in a few cases, notably in that of Hero and Leander, the expression of love is mutual.¹⁴ In these imaginary lovers' epistles Ovid fully depicts the anguish and passion of the human heart, giving Renaissance poets such as Marlowe and Shakespeare plenty of instruction in the form.

Another point at issue is that the Heroides treats of love affairs conducted between mortals, as is the case with Hero and Leander. Venus and Adonis differs from this in that one of the principals is a goddess. Notwithstanding, Shakespeare's treatment of Venus's passion for Adonis closely resembles Marlowe in spirit, while his shrinking-violet boy represents the kind of male beauty Marlowe extols in Leander. Similarly, Leander, while swimming to Sestos to keep his assignation with Hero, finds himself in the embrace of the sea-god Neptune, who has something of Venus's single-minded approach to love. Marlowe, like Shakespeare, freely mingles gods and mortals in his poem; in so doing both Elizabethan poets observe the ease with which ancient Greek and Roman deities inhabit a human landscape. The differing status of Venus and Adonis matters less than the gulf in passion that divides them, Venus's superiority as a divinity underscoring the irony and pathos of her plight as a beseeching wooer.

Venus and Adonis draws on various characteristics of Ovid, and while Ovid recounts this tale in the Metamorphoses, it is his talent for developing a mood of erotic hope and suspense in the Heroides (where the writers of the letters do not of course yet know the outcome of their passionate hopes) that Shakespeare drew upon for such episodes as Venus's attempt to seduce Adonis in the early part of the poem and her terrified intimation of his fate at the end.

Comparing Shakespeare and Marlowe (who was an accomplished classicist and translator, as his version of Ovid's Amores demonstrates) brings up the vexed question of Shakespeare's own prowess as a translator and the problem of his apparent dependence on Golding for his understanding of the Metamorphoses. Baldwin has shown decisively that Shakespeare had a good reading knowledge of Roman poetry and would have been capable of reading the famous episodes of Ovid without an intermediary.¹⁵ What, then, was Golding's function? To some extent he undoubtedly did make the task of reading Ovid that much easier; and if, as is fairly sure, Shakespeare used him as a crib, he would not have felt abashed by it. But Golding is more interesting as an inspiration than as a source; and it is in his role as a model of stylistic emulation rather than as a purveyor of classical tales that he deserves to be considered.

In the first decade of Elizabeth's reign, English poetry had a considerable distance to travel before it could claim to be the equal of other contemporary European literatures, to say nothing of the classics. Yet it is precisely the spirit of emulation which we see at work as the age begins that produces such treatises as Sidney's famous Apology for Poetry and Samuel Daniel's A Defence of Rhyme. Beginning with Italy, each of the major literatures which can be counted a part of the European Renaissance had to undergo the process of absorbing the influence of the ancient literature it sought to emulate while at the same time breaking the shackles which such an influence imposed. To do as the Romans was no good if that merely produced a stale, inkhorn imitation of the original. The solution was, as Bembo in Italy and Du Bellay in France both argued, to renew the vernacular in such a way as to incorporate the most characteristic strengths of the imitated language while enabling the native tongue to realize its own identity, and in particular its capacity for sophistication.¹⁶ The results were mixed and sometimes controversial, but, as we know, the enterprise succeeded. European literary languages did gradually come into their own as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries progressed, and as a way of exhorting his countrymen to emulate recent Italian successes, Daniel pointed to the example of Petrarch:

his twelve Æglogues, his Affrica … with his three Bookes of Epistles in Latine verse, showe all the transformations of wit and invention, that a Spirite naturally borne of the inheritance of Poetrie & iudiciall knowledge could expresse: All notwithstanding wrought him not that glory & fame with his owne nation, as did his Poems in Italian, which they esteeme above al whatsoever wit could have invented in any other forme then wherein it is.¹⁷

Correspondingly, what Golding offered to his contemporaries was not merely an aid to reading Ovid but also a means of emulating him, of realising the potential of the English language to accomplish poetic performances which had previously seemed dauntingly sophisticated. Ezra Pound, pronouncing with characteristic impatience, has made the point that Golding's fourteeners (his equivalent of Latin hexameter) proceed with anything but the monotony traditionally associated with the form.¹⁸ Golding's supple handling of line as well as his ability to keep pace with the amount of material Ovid packs into his hexametric verse can easily be demonstrated:

Yea even from heaven she did abstain. She lovd Adonis more
Than heaven. To him she clinged ay, and bare him companye.
And in the shadowe woont she was too rest continually,
And for to set her beawty out most seemely to the eye
By trimly decking of her self. Through bushy grounds and groves,
And over Hills and Dales, and Lawnds and stony rocks she roves,
Bare kneed with garment tucked up according to the woont
Of Phebe, and she cheerd the hounds with hallowing like a hunt,
Pursewing game of hurtlesse sort, as Hares made lowe before,
Or stagges with loftye heades, or bucks. But with the sturdy Boare,
And ravening woolf, and Bearewhelpes armd with ugly pawes, and eeke
The cruell Lyons which delight in blood, and slaughter seeke,
She meddled not. And of theis same shee warned also thee
Adonis for too shonne them, if thou wooldst have warned bee.

(Bullough, 1, 167)

The careful and varied pointing of enjambement and caesura keeps the reader constantly attentive, while the quiet shift from third person to direct address, as the poet delivers Venus's warning to Adonis, illustrates Golding's agility in deploying his protagonists alternately as bearers of narrative consciousness or as mere players in the scene. Although Marlowe and Shakespeare exceed him in the poise and confidence they bring to the iambic pentameter line, Golding none the less gives the later poets an idea of what can be done and the confidence to bring it off. His contribution, then, is that he provided something far more than a translation; he showed that it was possible to make English, a language that was yet to be formed when Ovid first rendered his myths into Latin, capable of transposing them into a new idiom.

But with all this it also matters precisely what kind of poem Golding decided to translate. Previous sixteenth-century translators, such as Surrey or Thomas Phaer, tended to choose the noble Aeneid as the representative Latin epic. Golding's choice of poetic narrative, the theme of which is for the most part not at all clear, and in which characterisation emphasises the dark and often perverse side of the human psyche, carried startling implications for the state of culture in which he wrote and into which Shakespeare (three years old when Golding's book appeared) had recently been born.¹⁹

The Metamorphoses provides a model for depicting psychologically interesting human dramas, and the Heroides shows how to bring a dimension of pathos to them. Shakespeare and his contemporaries drew freely on both works to create the amorous sub-genre to the epic, the epyllion or erotic narrative, as it is now more generally called …. Epic poetry celebrated warlike deeds (‘Arma virumque cano’ is the Aeneid's opening statement) and, as in the case of Virgil, occasionally further ennobled these by making them the basis for a celebration of national destiny. In the Renaissance, all epic tended towards the metaphysical, seeking to understand and explain the relationship of things through the actions depicting them. Yet a sceptical counter-movement also occurred. Love, which orthodox epic viewed as a distraction, or diversion at best, finds a curious centrality in Ariosto's brilliant romance epic, the Orlando Furioso, which shows a knight of Charlemagne's court pursuing a ludicrous, distorted passion. Ariosto challenges the humanist confidence in heroic ideals by showing they can be subverted by the slightest whim or impulse. Once enamoured, the knights can think of nothing else, just as Venus, having been pricked by her son's arrow (a detail of the legend rather than of the poem), longs insatiably for Adonis. Even apparently heroic actions such as the Saracens' assault on Paris can be seen as merely frustrated erotic feeling.

Yet the Orlando Furioso is regarded as a great humanist triumph, despite its mockery of ideals, and the reason for this is that it portrays in its own balance and composure, its even-tempered, good-humoured tone, the achievement of another ideal: mediocritas. Mediocritas is that avoidance of extremes which is the sign of a mature, reflective civilisation. According to this ideal, the mind that can weigh opposing or contradictory arguments and impulses without being overwhelmed by them is the best equipped to deal with the tricky, unnerving conduct of human fate and its affairs. It marks the survival and modification of the stoic impulse in a stabler, more spacious and expansive world in which capricious fortune is as likely to reward as persecute. The balance maintained by the Orlando Furioso, like that of Hero and Leander and Venus and Adonis, deploys itself in every aspect of its form. Ariosto understands the power of erotic impulse and even sympathises, like Shakespeare and Marlowe, with the torment it brings; but, like them, he gives equally good reasons for deriding it. Mediocritas, then, with its circumspect, charming formulations of scepticism or disbelief, shapes and controls a good deal of Venus and Adonis, especially the middle sections where the two protagonists find themselves engaged in an amorous controversy in which reason as much as passion dictates the terms. Yet it does not account for everything, least of all for the mood of pathos which adds a curious dimension to the erotic energy of so many of the stanzas or tempers the wit and humour of the prevailing argument.

Possibly the final answer lies with yet another Italian text. Written at about the same time as the Orlando Furioso, and adopting much the same perspective, Castiglione's Book of the Courtier presents a sequence of dialogues between various courtiers at the palace of Elisabetta Gonzaga. It was translated into English by Sir Thomas Hoby in 1561, and it rivals Golding's Ovid in the influence it exerted on Elizabethan authors. Its sophisticated, assured, good-humoured, courteous, and above all graceful conversational sequences demonstrate that evenness of tone and well-tempered balance that we have already touched upon. Castiglione in particular commends the art of doing difficult things (dancing, horsemanship, playing a musical instrument) seemingly without art, almost negligently; and the word he uses to express this is sprezzatura, meaning the apparent dispraising of one's own efforts, as if the achievement which others admire hardly merits attention.²⁰ Several of Ariosto's courtly episodes depict the kinds of pursuits that are discussed in Castiglione's book, love being a prominent topic. It is easy to imagine the appeal Venus's arguments would have for the sophisticated young men of Elisabetta's court, though Adonis would equally find a defendant there for his loftier viewpoint. None the less, we are not prepared for the temporary abandonment of refined Ariostan scepticism, which Castiglione maintains over the first three books, in favour of a statement of Neoplatonic ideals as Cardinal Bembo takes up the argument in Book IV. Responding with undoubtedly greater sympathy than Ariosto to the intellectual principles of the Florentine Academy of the late fifteenth century, whose two leading philosophers were Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Castiglione expresses through Bembo, himself the author of a Ficinian treatise (Gli Asolani), a vision of love as aspiring towards pure mind. Bembo's arguments, and above all the faith which maintains them, find no counterpart in the rest of the dialogue. Even those spokesmen who represent a more positive attitude towards human motivation (for example, Giuliano de' Medici) refrain from accompanying Bembo in his flight of Platonic fancy. Bembo does not in fact have quite the last word, though his powerful appeal is so placed as to leave the reader with an abiding impression of it as he closes the book. The Lady Emilia Pia gently tugs at the impassioned Bembo's sleeve, reminding him that his place is still on earth, and the court delivers a few ironic comments at his expense. Castiglione seems to be giving full rein to the Neoplatonic love ideal while acknowledging its inevitable obstacles.

The relevance of this to Shakespeare and Marlowe is that they combine in their narratives most if not all the qualities identified in the authors so far mentioned. The fascination and pathos of an Ovidian story mingles with the measured judgement of Ariostan humanism, whether as depicted in the versatile poise of the Italian poem or in the mature debate of Castiglione's pages. And The Courtier adds a further element beyond the scope of mediocritas; this is its vision of ideal love. It is questionable whether this element can be said to be present in Hero and Leander, though Chapman continued Marlowe's poem supposing that it was; but Venus and Adonis does contain it in some degree.

The difference between Hero and Leander, as it stands in Marlowe's version, and Shakespeare's poem is that the hero of the latter meets his death. This contributes the Ovidian pathos which we have already described; but it may do more. Once all possibility of fulfilling her desire has gone, Venus pays tribute to the qualities in Adonis which she claims first caused her to fall in love with him. She singles out his power to enchant wild beasts (1093-1104) and identifies Adonis as the unique source of ‘true, sweet beauty’ (1080) in a manner which anticipates claims made for the Platonic lovers in The Phoenix and the Turtle. Similarly, Venus bitterly prophesies that without Adonis's inspiring example love will be incapable of rising above its familiar low condition of fickleness and torment (1139-64). These are not aspects of Adonis that Venus seems to care much for while Adonis is alive and so to speak within her grasp, and we may accuse her of having a conveniently selective memory. Furthermore, during their initial debate, she parodies Platonic instruction, according to which the lover proceeds from the grosser senses to the more refined by reversing the order, starting with sight and culminating in taste:

But O what banquet wert thou to the taste,
Being nurse and feeder of the other four.

(445-60)

Despite this, the mood of expansive tenderness developed by the poem in its closing phase supports Venus in her exaggerated claims. If these are not precisely true to how she loved Adonis or to his real relation to the world and other creatures (we suspect, for example, pace Venus, that the boar was not in fact trying to kiss Adonis when he gored him), they present a vision of him that is necessary to the poem's tragic statement. Venus's appeal to the court of inspired love resembles closely that of Cleopatra (with whom she is often compared) as she reflects upon Antony:

But if there be, nor ever were one such,
It's past the size of dreaming. Nature wants stuff
To vie strange forms with fancy; yet t' imagine
An Antony were nature's piece 'gainst fancy,
Condemning shadows quite.

(Ant. 5.2.96-100)

The uniqueness of Antony, argues Cleopatra, is that while he is—or was—a mere mortal, a product of nature, he seems a being that only the imagination, the sphere of the ideal, would create. Now that Antony is remote and intangible, it appears that, for the first time, Cleopatra is able to understand what he truly represents. But seeing it requires a concentration of mind that grief alone can induce. In the same way, Venus seems to accept that Adonis's reluctance was not after all a mark of narcissism but fidelity to a principle of self-realisation:

To grow unto himself was his desire.

(1180)

This statement, though slightly ambivalent, does not carry a negative intention: it suggests both a retreat from the material world and a process of self-nurture. As such it is perfectly consistent with a Neoplatonic view of love, which places the attainment of an ideal condition above all other things, including the possession of the lover who has been its inspiration. For Venus, Adonis finally becomes such an object of love, but only after he is dead. While life and emotional turmoil exist, the pressure to enjoy the moment inhibits such absolute contemplation. Death alone makes it possible. Much though some readers would like her to, Venus sees no reason to feel remorse at her physical desire for Adonis or to regard the boar's fatal action as a symbol of the true end and nature of her passion.²¹ In this she is right. The poem's imperatives are not those of rationally constructed ethics but of nature, in whose world love is often unreciprocated and beauty perishes before it knows itself (in mockery of Adonis's confident reproach to Venus in line 525). The Neoplatonic vision, which is glimpsed sporadically and, in the main, comically earlier in the poem, functions seriously at the close not as its own triumphant principle but as an enhancement of tragic pathos.²² …

Notes

1. See Apology, p. 100. Sidney develops Horace (Art of Poetry, lines 408-15) who sees the two as necessary to each other.

2. Biographia Literaria, II, p. 15.

3. The claim being made here is not that English possessed greater resourcefulness than other contemporary literary languages (the writings of Rabelais would sufficiently rebut that), but rather that certain tropes, and above all the habit of punning, occur in English at a special rate and in an accentuated manner.

4. See Lewis, English Literature, pp. 498-9; and Allen, ‘On Venus and Adonis’ in Elizabethan and Jacobean Studies, pp. 100-11.

5. Akrigg, p. 184.

6. The poem carries sonnets addressed to ‘Lord S’. Some editors think this must be Southampton, but others incline to Ferdinando, Lord Strange (see Akrigg, p. 38). Nashe may have been prompted in his choice of Southampton by the ‘racy’ Venus and Adonis: as Gabriel Harvey commented, ‘The younger sort takes much delight in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis: but his Lucrece, & his tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke, have it in them to please the wiser sort’ (Shakespere Allusion-Book, i, 56).

7. See Akrigg, pp. 184-5. In 1596 Thomas Wilson dedicated to Southampton his translation of Montemayor's pastoral romance Diana, which had exercised a strong seminal influence on Sidney's Arcadia.

8. In fairness to Nashe and Shakespeare it must be said that they did try to cultivate a personal relationship, unlike some authors who cheerfully used the scattershot principle of dedicating their work to everybody who might prove useful (e.g. Henry Lok, who in 1597 published a sequence of religious verses with commendatory sonnets to Southampton and fifty-nine other worthies).

9. See Schoenbaum, p. 184.

10. In the seventeenth century, following a change in the cultural climate as well as in his personal fortunes, Southampton received works of a more overtly religious nature, such as Sylvester's Memorials of Mortalitie (1615) or one Thomas Ailesbury's Paganisme and Papisme (1624) (Akrigg, pp. 150 and 172).

11. Shakespeare applies this very argument to the young man of the Sonnets (specifically 1-17), which naturally raises the question whether Southampton may be identified with him. The evidence is strong but by no means conclusive, and other plausible candidates exist. It may also be that, as with certain of Shakespeare's plays, an idea once engendered (whether through a biographical impulse or not) recurs as a theme elsewhere.

12. ‘Epyllion’ is in fact a nineteenth-century descriptive term and means ‘little epic’. The Elizabethans, who did not distinguish genre so precisely, used variously such terms as ‘history’, ‘fable’, or ‘poem’.

13. Lucrece belongs to the ‘complaint’ rather than the Ovidian genre—….

14. As it is also, for example, in the letters between Paris and Helen, translated by Thomas Heywood and included in the expanded 1612 edition of The Passionate Pilgrim ….

15. See Baldwin, Small Latine, 2.417-55.

16. See Bembo, Prose della Volgar Lingua (1525); Du Bellay, Deffence et illustration de la langue francoyse (1549); and in England, Spenser's Shepheardes Calender (1579), particularly the ‘glosses’ provided by E. K.

17. Sprague, p. 141.

18. ABC of Reading, pp. 126-7.

19. Gordon Braden (pp. 8-16) argues that Golding's increasingly Puritanical cast of mind accounts for his discontinuing to translate pagan classics after his successful publication of the Metamorphoses.

20. Hoby renders the word as ‘disgracing’ (Castiglione, p. 46).

21. For example, see Bradbrook (p. 63), and Heather Asals, ‘Venus and Adonis: the education of a goddess’, SEL [Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900], 13 (1973), 31-51.

22. It is, as Lennet Daigle argues, possible to view the entire poem according to a systematic Neoplatonic programme (see ‘Venus and Adonis: some traditional contexts’, S. St. [Spenser Studies] 13 (1980), 31-46). This would mean that the sensual nature of Venus's initial appeal is to be seen as a first stage in her eventual progress towards pure love. But it is doubtful whether Venus, as the poem depicts her, would have rejected the erotic if Adonis had lived; and the humour with which Shakespeare demonstrates how ideal arguments serve personal interests (Adonis after all does not need to subdue an unruly passion in himself—he simply does not want her) reminds us that mediocritas keeps a firm grip on interpretation.

Abbreviations and Conventions

Shakespeare's Works

All quotations and line references to works other than The Poems are to G. Blakemore Evans (ed.), The Riverside Shakespeare, 1974. …

Wells-Taylor: Complete Works, ed. S. Wells and G. Taylor, 1986, with a separate Textual Companion (1987) …

Other Works, Periodicals, General References

Apology: Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. G. Shepherd, 1965. …

Bradbrook: M. C. Bradbrook, Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry, 1965 …

Coleridge: Samuel T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 2 vols., ed. J. Shawcross, 1954 …

Schoenbaum: S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life, 1977 …

SQ: Shakespeare Quarterly …